Scheduling and pricing of services to minimise CO2 emissions of delivery vehicles

Previous research found that minimising emissions often conflicts with maximising profit in service delivery. In this study, we consider a service scheduling problem and propose a new approach to the problem which applies low-emission vehicle scheduling techniques with dynamic pricing to reduce CO2 emissions and maximise profit. Incentives are included in the service prices to influence the customer’s choice in order to reduce CO2 emissions. To help the company determining the incentives, our approach solves the problem in two phases. The first phase solves vehicle scheduling models with the objective of minimising CO2 emissions and the second phase solves a dynamic pricing model to maximise profit. This approach is tested through numerical experiments.